When Diane Simpson was in high school in the early 1950s, she used to travel into Chicago from her family’s home in Joliet, Illinois. “On my ‘L’ train ride from the train station to the Art Institute,” she told me, “I looked forward to passing close-by to certain buildings.” Chicago had been famously dubbed the “city of the big shoulders” by poet Carl Sandburg; Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mies Van Der Rohe all built here. To this day, seven full decades later, the lines and masses of Chicago’s formidable architecture can be seen in Simpson’s sculptures.Not, of course, in any straightforward way: for Simpson portrays the world aslant, as if she were hurtling past on elevated tracks. In the late 1970s, returning as an MFA student to the Art Institute—she had taken some years off since her BFA there, to raise a family—she was working with a printmaking technique called “collography,” which involves affixing materials on to a plate, inking the collaged surface, then printing it onto paper as if it were an intaglio etching. The compositions gradually got larger until they could no longer fit on a printing press. “At that point,” as Simpson has recalled in an interview, “they naturally became wall sculptures.” The works “would have some dimensional sections that would angle out off the backing at 45 degrees…. They really wanted to pop off the page.”Photo Isabel Asha PenzlienIt was one of Simpson’s professors, Theodore (Ted) Halkin, who encouraged her to take the leap into three dimensions. Though she was initially skeptical—she’d trained as a painter, and had intended to stay one—this proved a major breakthrough, leading to Simpson’s first body of five sculptures, all made in triple-thick cardboard. She presented them in her graduation show in 1978, and, though sadly these works are no longer extant, photos attest to their immaculate construction, which has remained a hallmark of her work ever since. She made them in her dining room using a jigsaw, the blade mounted at 45 degrees, mitered them together, then brought out the patterns of underlying corrugation with rubbings of crayon.The first of Simpson’s cardboard sculptures remained engaged with the wall, but gradually, as she made more and began showing them (at Artemisia Gallery in Chicago, in 1979, then the following year with Phyllis Kind in New York), she brought them out into space as freestanding sculptures. It is as if she were reprising the development from 2D to 3D that had occurred in the early days of Minimalism, while calling much more dramatic attention to that spatial shift. She was still joining all the parts at 45-degree angles, resulting in an axonometric projection (though she says she didn’t know that term at the time) in which an object is represented with all its angles consistent, and its dimensions in accurate relation to one another. While more true to nature than traditional single-point perspective—and hence widely used in architects’ technical drawings—axonometry looks distorted to the eye. One could say that it is a non-human-centered means of representation, which refuses to portray reality in accord with our expectations. As critic John Yau has put it in Hyperallergic, “Her work conjures a world in which seeing something does not mean you can possess it.”Simpson rapidly discovered art historical precedents for her work, notably in Japanese screens, Ottoman miniatures, and Russian Suprematism. There were also evident connections to other Chicago artists, such as her professor Ray Yoshida and her peer Christina Ramberg, both of whom combined drum-tight execution with wildly imaginative transformations of everyday subject matter. Extending these multiple lines of association, she began in the early 1980s to refer to historic textiles in her works, often giving them titles like Lambrequin and Peplum (2017) or Jabot (2018). The sculptures never look quite like the shapes for which they’re named, but you can always detect a distant relationship—another type of imaginative projection.Especially important in Simpson’s lexicon have been the origami-like shapes of Japanese kimonos and samurai armor, forms of dress that depart radically from the lines of the body, imposing on it a rigid geometry. She clearly responded to these bold silhouettes, but she did not incorporate the actual techniques of garment making; she never learned traditional pattern-cutting, and has always preferred rigid planar materials such as MDF, sheet metal, and plastic. Simpson invented her methodology as she went along, enjoying the intricate challenges of construction that she sets up for herself in her complex preparatory drawings. Her final sculptures are no closer to the logic of their sources than a LEGO pirate ship is to an actual galleon.Diane Simpson’s 2025 installation at the Art Institute of Chicago.Courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago.The awe-inspiring results that Simpson has achieved through her self-generated system are on full display this fall, both in a full retrospective entitled “Formal Wear” at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in a presentation of three newly commissioned works for an outdoor terrace at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Arts and Letters show includes one phenomenally inventive work after another, among them the architectonic Underskirt (1986), a stepped splay of green lattice sheathed in a translucent scrim of cotton; Amish Bonnet (1992), a graceful curvature of brass tubes perched on a shelf, giving strong Martin Puryear vibes; and a multipart composition called Window Dressing (2007/8), one of a series that Simpson realized after she was offered six street-front showcases at the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin. “I had never considered such a project and it was certainly a new challenge,” Simpson recalls of this latter work, noting that her primary inspiration came from a copy she’d found of the 1928 book Merchants Record and Show Window; she transmuted the Art Deco patterns and curves shown on its pages into a miniature skyline.The outdoor sculptures for the Chicago Art Institute are her largest works to date. The exhibition’s title, “Good for Future,” is taken from a note-to-self that Simpson wrote on a roll of drawings back in the mid-1980s. True to her word, she has been realizing sculptures based on them over the course of the past five years. Each of the works at the Art Institute is painted in two closely related hues—paired greens, blues, and yellows—completely sheathing the MDF structure underneath. This strong palette is a striking departure, but in other respects the project comes full circle, all the way back to the cardboard works of her MFA thesis show. The signature skew is there, as are the vertiginous angles, the emphatic carving of space, the angular monumentality. If shipping boxes had their own warrior goddesses, they might look something like this.View of Diane Simpson’s 2025 exhibition “Formal Wear” at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York.Charles BentonSimpson’s works are all the more impressive when you consider that they were made in a one-car garage in suburban Wilmette, Illinois, which she has been using as her studio ever since she graduated in the late ’70s. Only now has she taken on an assistant, and only because the pieces are so large and heavy that she can’t move them without help. She has always derived creative energy from the limited circumstances in which she has been obliged to work. As Audrey Wollen puts it in the publication accompanying the Arts and Letters exhibition, “Simpson’s works wear her problems, the rooms in the house where she lived, and her resulting systems of ad-hoc solutions, on their (literal) sleeve: light, durable, cheap materials; Flat-Pak style patterns that can be easily moved and stored; methods of fabrication and assembly that are self-taught and done alone.”In a pattern that is all too commonplace with women artists, it has taken a very long time for museums to wake up to Simpson’s greatness. It was only with a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2015, curated by Dan Byers, that she began getting the institutional recognition she should have had all along. Presentations at Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Nottingham Contemporary followed, as did her inclusion in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. in addition to this fall’s exhibitions in the US, next year she will be the subject of a traveling retrospective organized by the Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation (MUMOK), Vienna, which travels to the Sara Hildén Museum in Finland.It’s arguably still too little, but thankfully not too late. Simpson is an artist of extraordinary endurance and determination, and at the age of 90, she remains at the height of her powers. As amazing as her sculptures look in photos, they are positively uncanny in person, as if they were somehow unstuck in space—an impression that by no means diminishes as one circles them. Also best appreciated first-hand is her sheer material intelligence. In art, as in any other context, craft is primarily a means of intensification—a way of saying, I really mean this. In Simpson’s works we have an unusually pure form of that conviction, combined with an equally strong impulse toward the elusive, the purely metaphorical. Is it any wonder that, when so many kinds of distortion pervade contemporary experience, these virtual-feeling sculptures feel so very relevant? For a half-century now, Simpson has been demonstrating a principle that most have yet to learn: it’s possible to accept the malleability of all that surrounds us, while also keeping it real.